Columbia still vivid for Texans who saw, heard debris hit

Each of the Columbia astronauts was remembered with a wreath at a ceremony Thursday in Hemphill.

Each of the Columbia astronauts was remembered with a wreath at a ceremony Thursday in Hemphill.

Photo: Johnny Hanson, Staff

Image 2 of 5

(FILES): This undated NASA handout image obtained 26 August, 2003 shows the crew of the US space shuttle Columbia. The accident of the US pace shuttle Columbia one decade ago, February 1, 2003, which claimed the lives of seven astronauts on board, was crucial in ending the US shuttle program in 2011. On the 10th anniversary of the disaster NASA will commemorate the astronauts killed in the ill-fated mission in a ceremony to be held February 1, 2013 at the military cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, near Washington, DC. Front from left are: astronauts Rick D. Husband, mission commander; Kalpana Chawla, mission specialist; and William C. McCool, pilot. Rear from left are: David M. Brown, Laurel B. Clark, and Michael P. Anderson, all mission specialists; and Ilan Ramon, payload specialist, representing the Israeli Space Agency. AFP PHOTO / FILES / NASA == RESTRICTED TO EDITORIAL USE / MANDATORY CREDIT: "AFP PHOTO / NASA" / NO SALES / NO MARKETING / NO ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS / DISTRIBUTED AS A SERVICE TO CLIENTS ==NASA/AFP/Getty Images

(FILES): This undated NASA handout image obtained 26 August, 2003 shows the crew of the US space shuttle Columbia. The accident of the US pace shuttle Columbia one decade ago, February 1, 2003, which claimed

Wyatt Heslip, 4, of Hemphill walks through the seven wreaths used during Thursday's 10-year commemoration ceremony of the STS-107 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster at the First Baptist Church in Hemphill.

Wyatt Heslip, 4, of Hemphill walks through the seven wreaths used during Thursday's 10-year commemoration ceremony of the STS-107 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster at the First Baptist Church in Hemphill.

Photo: Johnny Hanson, Staff

Image 4 of 5

Wyatt Heslip, 4, of Hemphill walks through the seven wreaths used during Thursday's 10-year commemoration ceremony of the STS-107 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster at the First Baptist Church in Hemphill.

Wyatt Heslip, 4, of Hemphill walks through the seven wreaths used during Thursday's 10-year commemoration ceremony of the STS-107 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster at the First Baptist Church in Hemphill.

Photo: Johnny Hanson, Staff

Image 5 of 5

The Houston Chronicle published an extra edition on Feb. 1, 2003, after the Columbia broke up over Texas during its re-entry from orbit.

The Houston Chronicle published an extra edition on Feb. 1, 2003, after the Columbia broke up over Texas during its re-entry from orbit.

Photo: Houston Chronicle

Columbia still vivid for Texans who saw, heard debris hit

1 / 5

Back to Gallery

HEMPHILL - The first day of February 2003 broke cool and clear over most of Texas - a perfect Saturday morning without a cloud in sight or a breeze to speak of - so there was scant reason to look up … until there was.

The sun had barely topped the treeline when people in the Piney Woods heard what some later described as a sonic boom. It was 8 a.m. Those who instinctively gazed into the morning sky noticed a sudden strangeness. Some saw a streaking flash of light, others a vapor trail or odd wisp of a cloud. Something was going on, albeit more than 39 miles above them.

And a few minutes later not above them, but in front, in back, and frighteningly close. In this small East Texas town, in nearby Nacogdoches, and across the 60 miles of countryside in between, there came bangs and crashes and thuds and a variety of fierce noises that bespoke something awful.

Translator

To read this article in one of Houston's most-spoken languages, click on the button below.

Phil Brown, a retired mechanic, still remembers the whistling sounds of objects approaching land at high speed, some preceded by mini-booms that echoed around his home at Toledo Bend Reservoir, which was still shrouded in early morning mist.

"I thought we were being bombed," Brown said. "It was foggy over the lake that day. So I couldn't see but only hear things dropping. They sounded hot because they kind of sizzled when they hit the water."

There are things you remember and things you cannot forget. The early morning of Feb. 1, 2003, is among the latter for most Americans of a certain age, and certainly for those around here, whose land and property were pelted by thousands of pieces of debris after the high-altitude disintegration of space shuttle Columbia during re-entry. For an unlucky few, those pieces included remains of the seven astronauts on board. But for all, the memories persist, the passage of 10 years and the end of the shuttle program mattering little.

The community's effort to pick up as many of Columbia's pieces as could be found, and treat those pieces with respect and dignity, brought people together and gave them a connection to NASA that none could have imagined. Before that morning, the space program belonged mostly to others - to Houston, home to the astronauts and Mission Control. To Florida, whose Space Coast boasted Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral's launch pads.

"This has touched every life and heart here," said Marsha Cooper, a U.S. Forest Service fire prevention officer who helped with the search. "It's something we'll carry with us always."

Lift from Scripture

The spacecraft, doomed by damage to an exposed portside wing panel that was normally heat-resistant, actually began to lose pieces west of California during its meteoric descent. Debris reports came in from places as disparate as Canada and the Bahamas, but most of what remained landed in Texas, and the bulk of that along a four-mile-wide corridor angling through the heart of East Texas.

This area quickly became a "ground zero," of sorts, where not only the remains of all the astronauts were found but also the 800-pound nose cone and the orbiter's version of a flight data recorder. A special rapport developed between the community and the astronauts' families, a connection that seemed almost beyond coincidence.

Cooper recalled telling the wife of shuttle commander Rick Husband how a pastor had recited a special Bible verse at every site where astronaut remains were recovered in Sabine County. That verse, Joshua 1:5-9, reads in part: "Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go."

Cooper said Husband's wife looked stunned upon hearing this. This was the exact verse that her husband had recited from memory when all the astronaut families held hands during their last supper together before being quarantined before their mission. That verse is now etched into a black rock outside the Patricia Huffman Smith NASA Museum, Remembering Columbia, that opened on the anniversary of the crash two years ago in Hemphill.

The Columbia accident galvanized people throughout several counties near the Louisiana border. Volunteers guided by local law enforcement as well as federal and state officials spent two weeks walking the woods, meadows and sloughs in the vicinity of Nacogdoches, San Augustine, Hemphill and other towns and hamlets along the Columbia flight path, looking for anything that might have been a piece of the space shuttle.

Following a presidential disaster declaration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency stepped in and set up four large, temporary camps housing thousands of paid workers. Finding Columbia's remains turned out to be the most expensive and elaborate such effort in history.

The debris field, loosely defined, covered almost 2,000 square miles. Helicopters and airplanes were employed, some of them outfitted with infrared scanning devices, and even satellite imaging was utilized.

Nearly 84,000 pieces

By the time the search ended at the end of April, almost 84,000 pieces had been found, the majority not much bigger than the hands that pulled them from the sandy soil. Almost half of the items recovered were so twisted, burned or small that they could not be identified as anything other than shuttle debris. In all, about 38 percent of the orbiter was recovered by the massive hunt.

Those parts that could be identified were placed on the floor of a hangar at Kennedy Space Center atop a shuttle-shaped grid. The team in charge of the reconstruction helped scientists conclude that a compromised wing panel was the culprit in the shuttle's demise, in large measure because recovery teams found 876 pieces associated with the left wing.

Of course, the wing was known to have been struck by a piece of falling insulation during liftoff and was the suspected cause from the beginning. Was it really necessary to mount an effort involving 30,000 people and more than 130 agencies at a cost exceeding $300 million?

Yes, without doubt, said Jon Cowart, the chief reconstruction engineer who oversaw day-to-day operations at the KSC hangar.

"From my perspective, it was necessary to go do it," said Cowart, now an engineer with the private company SpaceX. "It is a tragic fact of life you learn more from your failures than you do from your successes. Going through this taught us so much, including a lot about what our limitations were."

Cowart likened his team to a "NASA version of CSI," tasked with examining every piece to see if it bore a clue. The discovery of a plasma-sharpened piece of carbon panel from the left wing offered final confirmation that a hole in the panel had been Columbia's undoing. The team's report, which offered a lengthy explanation of how the small breach led to catastrophic results, capped months of ceaseless work: seven days a week, 12 to 14 hours on many days, with little time for family life or personal matters.

"Because of the way you felt about doing it, it didn't bother you," Cowart said of the workload. "Everyone took it personally."

As did so many people in and around this town of 1,200, whose diligence, in part, helped Cowart's people solve the mystery of Columbia's demise. What touched the East Texans most were not the items that so interested Cowart's engineers but the astronauts' possessions, the little things that reminded them that it was not just a machine that perished, but someone's mother, father, son, daughter, sister, brother.

Poignant prayer

Belinda Gay, who operated a support center for searchers in the early days and became one of the museum's committee members, pointed to a display case containing an unopened contact lens package that Commander Husband had taken with him on the mission. The package was a pointed reminder of Husband's perseverance. He had been rejected several times for service because of his eyesight.

In another case is a photocopy of a few tattered pages of a diary written in Hebrew by the first Israeli astronaut, Ilan Ramon. Experts took nearly a year to restore the fragile book, to the point where about 80 percent can be read.

While Ramon's wife has kept the contents confidential, she did release a small portion, a prayer that he had planned to recite while in orbit. It, too, was a reminder of sorts: Creation was the true miracle; and God, not man, was the true "king of the universe."